Over His Dead Body Page 21

  She laughed.

  "I noticed that you have one of those fancy cappuccino makers in there." He pointed at the house and her wonderful kitchen. "Does it work?"

  "Were you peering through the windows again, or have you been inside?" Cassie asked anxiously.

  "Just peeping. I saw the car was gone. The alarm button is on. I didn't want to mess with it." He smiled his disingenuous smile that made it clear he knew how to disengage burglar alarms when he wanted to. "I thought I'd hang out for a few minutes and see if you came back."

  "Thanks, I appreciate the courtesy."

  It was his turn to laugh.

  "Actually, I came back because I had a feeling someone was here," Cassie told him. It just wasn't who she'd expected. "Sure, it works. It works very well." She backed out of the door to let him out. "Come on in the house, I'd like some coffee myself."

  All the dancing moths on Cassie's oncidium jumped into her stomach as she led the IRS agent into the minefield of her house. She had no clear idea what Mitch had hidden there or what the agent was looking for. But she had a strange, upsetting feeling that he wasn't here only about taxes. He was here about her.

  She opened the door and turned off the burglar alarm that she'd used only rarely up to now. Then she went about grinding beans, setting up the machine, getting out the milk for frothing while Schwab looked around.

  "Nice Viking, Sub-Zero. What a pot collection!" He took it all in.

  "Don't get too excited. It's all fifteen years old," Cassie informed him.

  "Age doesn't matter with quality items," he replied, touching another nerve.

  "Some maybe. Do you like to cook?"

  "I fool around a little. I cook for my dad."

  "That's nice."

  "Not really. He has special needs. He has a problem swallowing." Charlie checked out the cupboards of dishes, good ones.

  "Really? That sounds unusual." The coffee machine started chunking and spitting, getting its job done. It was a big and fancy one, but it took a while.

  "It's a rare condition," Charlie said.

  "That's a shame," Cassie thought of the soft food groups. Purees, soups, ice cream. Puddings, soufflés. She didn't want to ask if Charlie lived with his dad or vice versa. Or if his wife lived there, too. He was the one who was investigating her.

  "He's been living with me for thirteen years, since my mother died." He answered her unasked question easily, pulling out a chair and plopping down at her table as if he'd been drinking coffee there for years. "I don't like to talk about it. Must be your kitchen that got me going." That smile again.

  Click. "I know what it's like. My mother died first, too. Widowers can have a lot of trouble if they don't remarry." Cassie kept it conversational.

  "Everybody has a lot of trouble if they don't remarry. But I agree with you about geezers. My dad is a handful."

  Cassie thought of Edith and nodded. Then a big thing happened in a tiny beat without her deliberating about it at all. She'd met a man she might have liked if she'd known him in high school. His investigation of her felt like a date, so she led with a strength. She'd skipped breakfast and missed lunch, and wanted something to eat with her coffee. There was nothing in the house, so she preheated the oven to four hundred and began to assemble scones. She filled a measuring cup with flour, added salt, sugar, baking powder, then cut butter into it, sprinkling in enough milk to create a small lump of soft dough. She patted the lump out on her granite countertop and kneaded in a handful of currents and some candied orange peel. Then she cut out eight tiny biscuits with a shot glass and frothed the rest of the milk while they were baking.

  By the time perfect scones came out of the oven, Cassie had set the table with her own strawberry jam and cappuccino in big cups, and her visitor was speechless with wonder.

  "Tell me about gift tax," she said matter-of-factly, as if this kind of hat trick was an everyday occurrence, which it was.

  "This is just the most amazing thing I've ever seen," Charlie said, lifting a tiny browned scone to his nose to sniff, as he had the orchid. "You just did that?" He snapped his fingers.

  "Well, we needed a grain food group," she explained.

  "Wow, a competent woman."

  She sipped the coffee. That was not bad, either. "Well, thanks. It's not as great as it looks."

  "Yes, it is. It's better than it looks," he murmured.

  She snorted. "The picture of perfect domesticity, I mean."

  "Oh?" He tilted his head in that way he had.

  "My comatose husband has a girlfriend." Cassie took a scone and broke off a tiny piece. "I didn't know he was planning to divorce me until the stroke. When I found out he and this girl had been together for years, I got upset, drove over to her house, and yelled at her, so she's suing me for ten million dollars. You came as a surprise on the same day." She sucked her lip into her mouth. "Actually, I'm a nervous wreck."

  "Well, you could have fooled me." Charlie drank some coffee and put the cup down. "This is the best coffee I've ever tasted. The best scones. About you, this says it all. It really does. You have a lot of style."

  Her lip trembled. "Thank you."

  "And I've seen it all. This is the oldest story in the world. I've lived it myself. What do you want to know about gift tax?"

  CHAPTER 32

  ON SATURDAYS CHARLIE SCHWAB HAD A SCHEDULE. In the morning he spent three hours working at his office. It was quiet there, and he liked to get out of the house, where Ogden always wanted to do father-son stuff together, like play Scrabble or poker and gamble with spare change. After work he had an hour and a half of real tennis at the indoor courts on Ocean Road with his friend Harvey-also a revenue agent-who was once ranked 143 on the tennis circuit and never got over it.

  After tennis, in which the score was always 6-4, 4-6, 6-5, with the two men taking turns at winning, they made the short hop across the street for lunch at Steven's Fish House. The one who lost did the grumbling, and they both had the same lunch year-round. Clam roll, fully loaded. Couple of beers. If the kitchen didn't have clams, they'd have an oyster roll fully loaded. After that, goodbye to Harvey. Charlie did the weekly food shopping for Ogden to reduce the risk of the Rau family giving him things he shouldn't eat. Chickpea fritters, onion kulcha, deep-fried pastries, vegetable tandoori. Everything big enough to choke a horse, not to mention a man who had trouble with applesauce. Then he'd go home with the groceries and play around in the kitchen whipping up some really yummy soft foods.

  This Saturday he expected the usual. He'd spent his workweek sniffing around the Sales situation, giving some thought to Mona Whitman and Cassie Sales. At first, he'd thought that since Cassie was the man's wife, she had to be in on it. He figured he could get her to open up easily enough. His plan had been to get down into the cellar and inventory the valuable wines their informant claimed was hidden there. The private cellar was only a small piece of the puzzle. What could Sales have down there, a few hundred cases? But it could serve as the "way in," the discrepancy in documenting that would justify a wider investigation.

  Their informant, via a number of anonymous letters on Sales stationery, had revealed that Mitchell Sales personally was taking in a lot of cash off the books. If that was the case, he had to be laundering the money somehow, or else getting it out of the country-maybe into a numbered account in Switzerland or offshore. Maybe both. The wife would certainly know about that.

  On Thursday when he was in Newark auditing a dry-cleaning chain-ironically enough, also a company that took in a lot of cash-Charlie had checked out a second Sales warehouse in New Jersey. It had been described in various documents as a depot, just a staging area of about 1,500 square feet. The warehouse at the address listed, however, turned out to be more on the order of 165,000 square feet, almost as large as the Long Island warehouse. Pay dirt indeed. He had been considering the ways to go with it. They could track the truckers, go through the garbage for the paperwork on the deliveries. Check the files in the computers inside there. Lo
t of things they could do.

  But yesterday the picture had changed for him. He'd searched the greenhouse at the Sales home, looking for a safe or a false floor in which Sales could be hiding gems or cash. He'd found only magical orchids-gorgeous, but probably not worth more than a hundred dollars each. During his three-hour talk with Cassie Sales over the coffee and the biscuits she'd made, then over fruit and a tiny glass of very good sherry, she'd filled him in on the wine distribution business as she understood it, and he'd explained gift tax.

  Maybe he'd been smitten over the coffee and homemade baked goods, maybe it was the sherry and grapes. But he believed her story about the girlfriend. If Cassie had only just learned about the girlfriend, as she claimed, it didn't seem likely that she was the informant. In any case, he hadn't had the heart to question her about the wine cellar in the basement or the offshore accounts. It seemed pretty clear that whatever he did, this beautiful, classy, and very nice lady stood to lose a great deal from his uncovering her husband's business dealings. So he'd done something unusual, he'd backed off.

  Charlie was in a deep brooding state when he stepped out of the district office building in Brooklyn after finishing up his work for the morning. Coming outside he was momentarily blinded by the dazzling mid-June sunlight. Then, just as earlier in the week in similar circumstances, he saw Mona Whitman leaning against her car. It was seventy-eight degrees warm. The sky was robin's egg blue, and there were no clouds floating around up there where heaven was supposed to be. Mona was wearing sunglasses, tight pants, high heels, and a little sweater that didn't hide her magnificent chest.

  "Charles Schwab. Hi." She waved and called out to him. "I think I found something that might help you."

  "No kidding." He walked over to see what it was.

  "Wow, you look different on the weekend," she said admiringly.

  He was dressed in the cut-offs and white T-shirt he always wore for tennis. None of that fancy stuff for him. The T-shirt he was wearing had a few holes in the ribbing around the neckline. Mona pointed at the bulging Bloomingdale's shopping bag sitting on the car beside her.

  "What's in the bag, money?" Charlie joked.

  "I wish. How are you?" She said this as if they were best friends who'd been apart for too long.

  "Okay. How's Mr. Sales doing?"

  "Oh, he's coming along just fine." Mona glanced down at her feet. "Have you been working on our case on a fabulous day like this?"

  Charlie's smile broadened.

  "What's funny?"

  "Everybody thinks theirs is the only case we ever work on. I have others, you know." He was thinking, bingo the girlfriend, no wonder Cassie lost it.

  "Everybody says you work too hard." Mona was flirting.

  "Who'd say that?" Charlie scratched his head.

  "Oh, you think you're the only one who finds out things about people." She laughed. She had a very pleasant laugh that Charlie found chilling.

  She could be an informer. She could be a spy for the other side. The first person who'd ever smashed his windshield had been a woman. Charlie never forgot he had to watch himself. He glanced at his watch. By now Harvey would be on his way to Indoor Tennis. He had to go.

  "Harvey, right?" Mona said coyly.

  Charlie raised his eyebrows. This woman actually knew where he was on Saturday morning, where he was going. Not good.

  "You'd be surprised how much I know about you." So she read minds, too. Very cute.

  "I know, you've got to go." She pushed herself off the car and reached for the shopping bag, offered it over. "Here."

  "What's this?" He looked inside. It was full of paper.

  She waved her hand at it. "Sales records." Her giggle was like a birdsong. "Sales records for Sales's sales. I thought you might find them useful."

  Great. This was the kind of thing his mother used to do. Bring him the tax stuff in a shopping bag. Of course, he'd loved his mother. He nodded at Mona, tilted his head to one side. Mona certainly wasn't anything like her. His tongue poked at the side of his cheek. He got the feeling she was like the car bomb Rau had found attached to his poor muffler last month. He didn't know who'd planted that.

  "Are you always this hard work?" She shifted hips.

  He clicked the tongue. Tsk, tsk, tsk. She was good.

  "Well, I'll be getting along then." The door was locked. She fumbled with her car key. After a short struggle, in which he watched her shake with the huge effort of pressing the remote, she twirled around like a dancer.

  "I mean, I'm all alone with this. Poor Mitch is in the hospital, and his wife wants to pull the plug on him. It's so upsetting. I never thought she'd go so far. First the terrible financial drain. Now this. The truth is, I don't know what to do." She blurted all this with a great spurt of emotion.

  Charlie didn't respond. He knew a good act when he saw one.

  "I thought we could talk about it over that lunch. After your tennis game, I mean," she amended quickly.

  "Fine." Charlie nodded. Maybe she was asking him out for a date. Maybe she was coming on to him. Maybe she was a spy or the informer or the girlfriend or all of the above. He held on to the shopping bag filled with papers. Could be something, could be nothing. Whatever Mona had for him, though, she activated Charlie's alarm system.

  "That's a yes, right?" Mona said, clapping her hands, triumphant in a win.

  TWO HOURS LATER, after Harvey had beaten Charlie 6-4 in the first set and 6-2 in the second and was out of the picture, Charlie and Mona were sitting at one of the picnic tables ordering clam rolls at Steven's.

  "Thank you for meeting me," Mona said, triumph still written all over her. "This is really a cute place. Do you come here with your father?"

  "I'd guess this isn't the sort of place you come to," Charlie said. He was pretty sweaty even though he'd let Harvey beat him. He hadn't showered because there was no shower at Indoor. It was just a bubble. He was sure he stank, but didn't care. He was working now.

  Mona laughed and held up the menu. She pointed at the page of beer choices and only two wines, house red and house white. "I'd say you're right. But I love it," she added quickly. "I just love working-class places."

  "No kidding." Charlie hid his grimace. It was clear she thought he was a blue-collar worker.

  "No kidding," she returned quickly. "My grandmother was a Rockefeller, but my mother was a hippie before stoned and cults were fashionable. But enough of that. Tell me about your life." She propped her elbow on the table and nestled her chin in her hand as if suddenly he'd metamorphosed into the kind of fascinating high WASP captain of industry she liked.

  He talked for quite a while about absolutely nothing that could help her, watching to see if her eyes glazed over. They didn't. She gazed at him with rapture throughout his long, complicated, and excruciatingly dull monologue about the tax structure.

  "How about a woman? Is there a lucky woman in your life?" she asked when he'd finished.

  "Oh, sure." He was working on the clam roll.

  Her little face fell. "I bet you have a girlfriend."

  "Ummm." Chew, chew, chew. Swallow. Great clam roll with lots of sauce oozing out all over him.

  "What's she like?"

  "What about you? Are you attached?" he asked with his mouth full.

  "Attached? Oh no, there's no one, just Mitch. I mean, I've really devoted my entire life to the business. I was married for a while, but it didn't work out. Soooo, I just took my name back and Mitch's family as my own. Cassie and the children are like my own flesh and blood. That's why her behavior is so… painful." She pressed her lips together to keep the tears back.

  Charlie wiped his mouth with the paper napkin and pushed his plate away. So she'd devoted her life to Mitch. She was the girlfriend who was suing Cassie for a cool ten mil.

  "Maybe you should think about having a family of your own," he said, gazing back at her with interest. "I bet it would be pretty easy to get a husband if you wanted to."

  "Do you really think so?" She s
eemed to doubt it.

  Charlie nodded, amused that this wily woman of self-proclaimed excellent pedigree was trying to get him to believe she was insecure. She worked on it a little more.

  After lunch, she offered him a ride in her car. She gave him the keys, and he actually got a huge kick out of driving a car he could never own himself. He followed the road out to Long Beach, where they got out of the car to look at the water. So far she hadn't told him a single useful thing, but neither had he. They were playing it very cagey.

  On Long Beach itself, there was a five-mile boardwalk. Mona said she loved hiking, but couldn't exactly walk in the shoes she had on. So, they stood in the breeze for a while and contemplated the beach and the ocean. Beautiful. People were out there in their bathing suits, sitting on the sand, walking, playing volleyball. For a moment Charlie thought that it would be nice to be part of a couple, to have a classy, competent woman in his life who wasn't a transient he couldn't wait to get rid of at the end of an evening or early the next morning. Someone he could cook and eat with, talk to, relax with.

  As he was thinking this, Mona took his hand and held it tight. "You're amazing," she told him with eyes as big and deep as the ocean in front of them.

  CHAPTER 33

  AT FIVE O'CLOCK CHARLIE DROVE HOME to change his clothes for a drink at Mona Whi tman's house. He felt he'd hit pay dirt with the invitation to come to her home. Usually their residences were the last places taxpayers wanted agents to go. Whatever Mona wanted him to see there, however, Charlie knew he would learn a lot. In the last few days he was working overtime for the service, being more popular and having more dates than he'd had in months. He was doing fieldwork, and the field was coming to him. The only question was how much sowing he would have to do, and what kind of harvest he would get for his efforts.

  The Sales case wasn't numbered for criminal investigation yet. As far as the district director and the regional commissioner were concerned, he was still doing background for a routine audit. But he could smell fear emanating from every corner of the case. There was so much quaking going on, he'd begun to think conspiracy. He had his eye on a bigger target now, Ira Mandel, accountant, adviser, and third-party record keeper to many high-profile taxpayers. If he was a rotten apple at Sales, he was a rotten apple elsewhere, too.